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Mario All Grown Up?
Reggie Fils-Aime, frequent spokesperson for Nintendo, has a piece extolling the way in which Nintendo will disrupt the videogaming market with the release of the Revolution. His editorial uses the movie industry as a comparison, and likens the systems of Sony and Microsoft to 'flops'. From the article: "Nintendo's counterpunch is disruption. We've determined that the videogame market is ripe for revival--and we're looking to make it happen by reaching out to the millions of players still on the sidelines, including those over the age of 35. Early moves have been promising. Nintendogs, a game that allows people to train virtual puppies, has doubled the typical percentage of female purchasers, selling 1.5 million copies in about four months. Not bad, given that Nintendo DS hardware is in 4 million hands." Yeah, it's just more advertising claptrap, but the levels of hyperbole they're reaching is sort of breathtaking to behold.
.. Mario's been at those mushrooms again.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
"Yeah, it's just more advertising claptrap"
In a time where you have other industry elites saying the video game market has topped out (EA), there's no room for growth in MMOG (Richard Garriott), many companies are just going belly up (Atari), Microsoft can't get is product to the street, the PSP is nothing more than a mini-DVD player and one of the major selling points of the PS3 is that it's a HI-DEF DVD player, Nintendo OPENED UP a new market and sold 1.5 million copies of a game to WOMEN in 4 months.
Claptrap? Nah... I think I'd listen to what the guy has to say.
We (gamers) are being sequeled to death...
;)
we all know this... Usually we blow it off by casting the shame towards the genre we don't like as much...or point to the fewer and fewer glimmers of originality.
But this does not stop the truth we all well know.
Something needs to change.
Maybe its the publishers, maybe its the develoupment model/cycle.
Nintendo is trying to change its machine to be able to do something more than push out one polygon/sprite/bit more than its competitors.
Last time they were our saviors (NES)...maybe..just maybe...they are trying to save us again before the industry REALLY needs it.
*NOTE: trying to save us does mean they can still fall on their asses trying, not to mention how much money they made last time they *were* right
What a bunch of cock and bull
;) )
Adult != blood sex and violence.
Tell me, seriously, what any console did to attempt to attain "adulthood" besides those three things.
Show me ONE, ONE 1st party game with a complex plot no pre-teen could understand. Show me growth towards maturity...
All I saw was a bunch of puberty-like masturbation over big boobs, blood by the gallon, and violence.
(*Note: While GTA does have blood, boobs, and violence...it actually has a story, setting, and a POINT to using those three in a very provacative way. And it wasn't a 1st party title
because gameplay is weak and games are intimidating and hard to use? It's true in my case. More to the point, previously "hardcore" gamers are, I think, being pushed into the "non-hardcore" camp.
Games are what brought me to the PC from Unix platforms in the late '80s and early '90s (well, games and Linux). I am the ideal market: male, 20s-30s, very technical, able and willing to assemble my own systems and very, shall we say, "intrigued" by ever-faster and sexier hardware.
For a long time before I started with PC games, I was a rabid text-based adventure and Nethack fan. But the graphics and variety of PC platform games were just too sexy to me and by the mid-to-late'90s, I was what I would consider to be a hardcore gamer: SMP, relentless video card upgrades, lots of RAM, RAID for faster level loads, CD changers to play multi-disc games more smoothly, 21" monitor, etc., moving into console platforms, buying just about every game that came out...
But it all tapered off somehow. Games would feel less engrossing, or the keyboard learning curve would be so high that I wouldn't play it after I'd bought it. At first, it was just one or two games that I wasn't bothering to complete, but by the time I had the latest 10 or 15 titles in my hands and a system that could play them all, yet I hadn't finished any of them and found myself preferring to do other things instead, I realized that this gaming thing was becoming a worse investment since I didn't seem to be enjoying it as much... and my game buying tapered off.
In retrospect, though I played a bunch of FPS games all the way through, the games that I find most memorable (and that I still own long after most of my game library has gone the eBay way) are the games that today's "hardcore" gamers ruthlessly mock. I still own Myst, Riven, Zork Nemesis, the Ultima series (including Ultima IX: Ascension), the King's Quest series (including Mask of Eternity), and so on. In short, they're primarily adventure-driven games whose interfaces and schemas are not so complex that one must spend two weeks in "learning curve" mode before actually having any fun.
I have some friends who still game all the latest titles, but I've tried them and they're just not that entertaining. There's nothing for the imagination there. You simply mindlessly flail about on your keyboard with ultra-complex controls while trying to blast things. Rather than being revealed to you through experience, evidence, and events (as was strongly the case with, for example, Myst or Riven), stories are simply told to you in annoying pages-long sessions of reading or long monologues by animated characters that I don't care about and that punctuate the otherwise mindless action.
In short, most games aren't fun anymore. The past is full of great games in dead genres. Text- or command-based adventure (i.e. Infocom games, early Sierra games), text-based RPG (Nethack, Rogue, et. al.), graphical adventure (Myst, Riven, Sanitarium, Obsidian, Grim Fandango, a million other amazing titles), action-adventure (Ultima IX: Ascention, Mask of Eternity, Nocturne), action platform/scroller (NOX, Gauntlet, Flashback), strategy (Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, Alpha Centauri).
I can't really think of any FPS, pure role-playing, racing, or sports computer games that are at the top of my list... Yet that's all that's on the market today. Compare to 1997, when the shelves were full of imaginative games in many genres. It's as though the improvement in graphics has pushed the "reality" paradigm to the forefront, leaving no room in the marketplace for "fantasy," which is really the only reason I ever played games to begin with. I want to go to other worlds that don't bear too big a resemblance to mine, and to enjoy myself while I'm there (i.e. it shouldn't feel like work).
Instead, today's games have a very high learning curve (trying to learn to play one of them feels like being in school, you can't just pick up as you go, and the controls demand full attention, not leisurely
STOP . AMERICA . NOW